[rjccjr]

Hi All;

Well, today is sort of a keel laying day, a nice bright sunny New England day. It started at sixteen degrees and is now up to a blistering twenty six. Found a beautiful building plank during the week. The central keel, base plate, weather deck and first eight bulkheads are drawn. Even before anything gets glued there are difficulties. The hulls of the Atlanta class cruisers were rounded along the deck edges. It was obvious that this was going to be a challenge during the build. Well it's a problem in the design as well. Two difficulties presented themselves when the drawing of the bulkheads began. First came the curved edges. They caused difficulties with the edge of the weather deck. The second was a pronounced knuckle of the side plates, from the bow to just forward of the third turret. It took all week to solve that, but the first eight bulkheads are drawn. The hull aft of that is slab sided until it approaches the stern, where it curves inward at the waterline. That shouldn't be as bad as the forward section. Rather than do the mock up of the entire hull at one time, this will require doing the forward section first. Everything forward will have to be dry fitted and modified before anything gets glued down.

The process started with drawing a light pencil line right down the center of the wood base. Then the forward plate and keel were positioned. The dimensions so far seem to be fairly good. During the coming week I hope to get the card base plates and keel parts connected and test fitted. Here are photos of the forward bulkheads and the positioning of the forward parts. It's a good thing that I never gave up my day job, because it would never work out for making a living.

Regards, rjccjr